New Documentary Investigates Death Of General Patton: Tragic Accident Or Assassination?

4:54 PM 08/10/2016 | Entertainment

Joshua Delk | Contributor

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More than 70 years after the end of the second World War, conspiracy theories suggesting General George S. Patton’s death was not just a tragic accident continue to persist.

An upcoming documentary from director Robert Orlando and Nexus Media titled, “Silence Patton: First Victim of the Cold War,” raises new questions surrounding Patton’s death.

“Silence Patton” begins “with the question of if he was killed, then goes into the motives that there were to kill him,” said the director in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller. Patton had vowed to open up about the war, Orlando explained, and the documentary team investigates what criticisms or secrets Patton would have told the public.

A heavy Army truck struck Patton’s vehicle in December of 1945 outside of Mannheim in Germany. The collision left him paralyzed and took his life 12 days later. Suspicious circumstances surrounded the fatal crash: none of Patton’s passengers were injured, and the truck driver and his passengers mysteriously disappeared soon afterwards.

Orlando’s team of scholars and historians develop the theory of an elaborate cover-up and botched investigation of Patton’s death, while questioning if it was merely a coincidence that the loud-spoken critic of the Allied war tactics died the very day before he was set to return to the United States.

Just how honest was Eisenhower being with his son when he told him, “I’m not getting rid of Patton for what he just did, I’m getting rid of him for what he’s going to do next”?

Patton and Churchill agreed: the Allies should have taken the Eastern European capitols, pushing the Russians back to their pre-war borders. The blame for the aftermath of the war, as detailed in Patton’s journals, fell on the shoulders of Eisenhower and Generals Bradley and Montgomery.

Orlando cited Patton’s knowledge of “the nature of the tyrant in Europe,” the inevitability of the Soviet regime’s expansion and communist overthrow of Eastern European democracies. According to Orlando, the decisive general believed that “if we don’t fight Russia now, we’re going to lose.”

“Why would we cut bait and leave,” questioned Orlando, when it was clear that Stalin’s Russia was in the position to expand his regime further into Europe?

The film critically asks why this expansion “was not OK for Hitler but OK for Stalin,” said the director.

“Silence Patton” makes another “big leap” in “pulling off the scab that was the Russians’ years of ethnic cleansing after the war.” Orlando’s documentary tells the forgotten horrors of the Polish and Eastern European nations’ decimation by the Red Army in the years after the German surrender.

Patton’s belief that the Russians were the future enemy, and his disapproval of what Orlando termed FDR’s “costly enchantment” with Stalin would have made him highly unpopular with the wartime leaders, especially the FDR administration.

FDR’s portrayal in the film is “extremely negative,” hinted Orlando, toward his ability to make peace and “for allowing communism to come to America.”

Scholars featured in the film claim that Patton was ready to come home and tell the truth about what happened in Europe. “You can make a clear defense of silencing Patton,” said Orlando, “but did they silence him completely? Many really believe he was.”

Was the man who “lived the life of a warrior and wasn’t concerned about the politics” victim to an assassination or just an untimely death? The evidence hits select theaters this fall.